Is anyone surprised by
this?
Can we even believe it's an accident? Of course they aren't
trying to disenfranchise poor blacks.
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Is anyone surprised by
this?
Can we even believe it's an accident? Of course they aren't
trying to disenfranchise poor blacks.
The Web is full of people with too much time on their
hands: some of them have put together the
Art
Gallery of the
Virtual Toilet Paper
Museum. [No inferences, expressed or implied, are guaranteed
by the inclusion of this link.]
Unclear
on the concept: the daughter of a man who was killed
by a reckless driver says
"It's disgusting. I think that angers me more than [the accident]," she said. "We all do stupid, foolish things. We all speed, we all run red lights....It's understandable in a young kid's frame of mind. What's not understandable is robbing a dead person.
She can forgive her father's death--because "we all" risk killing strangers?!--but not a couple of hundred dollars he'll never have the chance to spend.
Australians can now patent "innovations" without a lawyer or,
apparently, anyone at the patent office looking at the claim:
using the new system, a Melbourne man has
patented
the wheel, as a "circular transportation facilitation device."
Mr Keogh said he patented the wheel to prove the innovation patent system was flawed because it did not need to be examined by the patent office, IP Australia.[via Slashdot, so try again if necessary]"The patent office would be required to issue a patent for anything," he said. "All they're doing is putting a rubber stamp on it."
What the Census Bureau
won't
tell anyone. Advocates for the homeless asked that state-by-state
data on homelessness not be released; the local governments that made
extra efforts
to count homeless people are displeased.
Hiding in paragraph 16, we see the bureau covering for itself, or maybe for the GOP:
The bureau has also been criticized for not releasing information on why it recommended that the census not be adjusted to compensate for people who were missed or counted twice....[free registration required]Some cities, including Los Angeles, have sued the bureau in a bid to force it to release the results of a survey of 314,000 households that was designed to check the accuracy of the census. The agency has refused to do so, and critics say it is suppressing the results of the survey because it would indicate that adjustment was justified.
Hypoallergenic
kittens? A biotech company--which is still
looking for funding--plans to create transgenic cats that
lack a single protein, which they claim is the cause of most
allergic reactions. Animal welfare
groups are critical:
Many of the kittens are likely to die before birth and of those that survive there is the very real possibility that they may have abnormalities that compromise their welfare.We've been breeding cats, and other domestic animals, to suit our needs for millennia; how different is this? I'm not allergic to cats as a class, but I am allergic to one specific cat, making me wonder if the problem is as simple as the would-be gene-splicers claim.
Genetically modified canola is
becoming
a weed in western Canada. It has been engineered
to resist most herbicides; Monsanto, which developed one
of the GM canola strains, is offering to send teams out to
weed by hand.
[via Red
Rock Eaters]
The latest
theory
about the Loch Ness Monster is that she's not an
ichthyosaur, or a fish, or any kind of animal: a
geologist thinks that witnesses actually saw
earthquake-induced waves.
Update: The
text
of the Supreme Court decision in
New York Times v. Tasini is available as a PDF.
The National Writers Union points
to that, the New York Times story, and a press release
describing the ruling as "a victory for creators and consumers."
They also advise freelancers on what to do now.
The Washington Post
story
is headlined "Freelancers Win Fight Over Reuse of Works". It
quotes the justices, and (I think) is fair to both sides; the
author notes that the Post filed briefs in support
of the newspapers involved in the suit.
Free plug department:
Purple
House Press is reissuing The Space Child's Mother
Goose, a delightful, long-out-of-print collection of verse
by Frederick Winsor.
Probable-possible, my black hen,
She lays eggs in the Relative When.
She doesn't lay eggs in the Absolute Now,
Because she's unable to postulate how.
The Supreme Court has ruled
in
favor of freelancers in an important copyright case:
by 7 to 2, the court agrees that publishers do not have
the automatic right to redistribute freelance work on CD-ROMS
or in databases.
[More later, I hope--this is a four-paragraph article from Reuters.]
The Black Death may
not
have been bubonic plague: two researchers took a new look at
contemporary records. Noting the quarantine procedures, and the
apparent absence of dead rats, they suggest that the actual culprit
was an Ebola-like virus.
[via Follow Me
Here]
Genetic studies suggest that
malaria
is only as old as agriculture. This doesn't mean someone
planted a melon and harvested a new disease: agriculture is
when malaria started being a serious problem for humans.
The [human genetic] changes can be dated to roughly 8,000 years ago in the case of a gene variant widespread in Africa and to roughly 4,000 years ago in the case of a second version of the gene common among peoples of the Mediterranean, India and North Africa.[registration required, but free]Last year two biologists noted from study of the malarial parasite that certain of its genes were very uniform in their DNA code, suggesting that the parasite's population had undergone a sudden expansion, maybe as recently as 5,000 years ago.
Archimedes was at least two millennia ahead of his time.
A palimpsest first discovered in 1906 showed that he anticipated
Newton and Leibniz. A recent
closer
look at the parchment reveals work that would have been
revolutionary in the late 19th century, and there are still three
untranslated folios of
The Method of Mathematical Theorems.
[again via Red Rock Eaters]
Not all dangerous new species are found in the
tropics: an
unknown
poisonous spider has been found under
Windsor Castle.
There is a vicious spider on the loose: up to three inches long, venomous, and with jaws strong enough to puncture human skin.[via Red Rock Eaters]The arachnids were discovered last week in an underground maintenance tunnel in Windsor Great Park, not far from the Queen Mother's weekend residence, Royal Lodge. They are being examined by an entomolgist to try to identify them--they could be either a new, underground-dwelling species or one previously thought extinct.
If you're as annoyed with Bush's "tax rebate" as I am,
pledge
to donate the money to organizations that are working
against the Bush agenda. TaxRebatePledge.org isn't asking
for money for themselves: they're publicizing the idea,
providing a list of good causes you can donate to, and
keeping a tally of people who have pledged.
If you actually need the money, keep it. But if you actually need the money, you probably won't be getting a check anyhow.
The
first
results from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, combined with
results from a Japanese experiment, are strong evidence for neutrino
oscillation. This means physicists were right
about how the Sun works,
but they'll need to explain the neutrinos.
SNO is a hole in the ground--an abandoned nickel mine--containing 1000 tonnes of water. For the next phase of the experiment, they're
adding salt to the heavy water, to study another neutrino reaction with deuterium that provides a large sensitivity to all neutrino types.In Phase 3, they'll be cooking the world's largest bowl of spaghetti.
Copyright 2001 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
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